Somaly's story pt 2

This is the second part of Somaly Lun's story that appeared in The Observer magazine in the UK last weekend. You can find it online here. The article is by Andrew Anthony.

Somaly Lun today (pic Harry Page)

Part 2:

Until very recently, Somaly had not spoken to anyone about her experiences in Cambodia. Even with her husband, Borithy, who is also a Cambodian, she left the past buried in silence. She met Borithy in Phnom Penh, where she headed after the reunion with her remaining family. With her schoolgirl English, she found work in a hotel, liaising with the foreign aid workers who had begun to arrive. Among them was Marcus Thompson, a 34-year-old Englishman working for Oxfam, who would later extend another vital helping hand to lift her clear of a human swamp. The onetime privileged son of magistrates, Borithy fell immediately in love with the 20-year-old Somaly. But she was not easily wooed. Thinking him a playboy, she was suspicious of his intentions. "I wasn't in love with him," she says now, sounding at once proud and coy. "He tried to court me all the time and I was never interested. Because he's good-looking, so intelligent, and because of his background, he had so many girls after him. I thought, he'd never keep me. Why me? There are much more pretty girls than me. And I certainly do not want to be one of his conquests!" It was only after Borithy told Somaly his own terrible story that she lowered her defences. She learned that he had lost both his parents to the Khmer Rouge, as well as his youngest brother. One sister died of starvation in his arms and the other was tied to a pole and left to die in the heat of the sun. "He had to cut her down at night. It was her last breath." When Borithy discovered that his life was in jeopardy in Phnom Penh, he told Somaly that he had to leave, but he wouldn't go without her. So in March 1980 they married inside a wrecked pagoda and fled the next day to the Thai border. Once more they both faced enormous risk. "There were Khmer Rouge," Somaly explains, "Khmer bandits, Thai bandits, Thai soldiers, who would shoot at anyone trying to cross, and minefields."

Nevertheless, they got through and stayed at a refugee camp with thousands of other Cambodians. It was there that she ran into Marcus Thompson again. The aid worker was so astounded by the conditions in which they were living, trapped near the border, unable to go on or go back, that, with the backing of Oxfam, he applied for asylum on their behalf. Much to everyone's surprise, the British authorities granted entry to Somaly and Borithy, and shortly afterwards, her mother, brother and sister. When they arrived in England, in May 1981, they made a commitment never to look back on what had happened. Instead they would put all their energy into building a new life, not least because they had created a new life. Somaly was pregnant with her first child, Mary Thida. "For the first 10 years I was here," she says, "I was just blocking it out. Not mentioning it. Both of us. We both had nightmares. We both woke up in sweat sometimes. But we never talked about it. We didn't want to."

They lived in a convent in Brighton initially, and then moved to Witney, where Somaly, who had learned English as a schoolgirl, found it hard to comprehend the language. "I thought, my goodness why can't I understand my neighbours? Because they were all Scottish and Irish! It was so surreal. I just kept saying, 'Pardon? Pardon?' But my neighbours were wonderful." She also had to adjust to a cool climate. Yet as much as she missed the tropical heat, she found cold, damp England to be a kind of bliss. "Because you don't go to bed at night and worry about whether you're still going to be here in the morning," she says.

In 1986, she had a second daughter, Bophanie. "Best of all were the girls," she says, flushed with motherly love. "They were our future. We would make sure they'd never go through what we went through. They were born free. All I had since the age of 10 was war, hatred, killing. To come here and see peace and tranquillity and people just getting on with their life…" she trails off, as if there were nothing more that needed to be said. In the current debate on asylum seekers, the extraordinary efforts some people make to improve their circumstances are often underestimated or overlooked. But Somaly and Borithy were never simply economic migrants in search of a better standard of living – they wanted a better life. And they laboured hard to get it. While Borithy studied English at Oxford Brookes University, Somaly did whatever work she could find, taking in sewing at home, and working part-time in shops. Then in 1994, Borithy returned to Cambodia to work with landmine victims. He has remained there, working to reconstruct the country, ever since. He now heads up a consortium of Cambodian NGOs. The family have had to make do with annual visits, but effectively Somaly has brought up the two girls on her own. She deliberately concealed her story from her children, hiding books about Cambodia and keeping her history safely out of sight. She and her mother, who died eight years ago, never told the girls what had happened to their family. "I didn't want them to be burdened by their past," she says.

What she wanted for her children was a normal childhood, the very thing that she was so cruelly denied. "It's almost as if I lived through them," she says. "It's very important to me that they enjoy their lives." As it turned out, Mary went on to study PPE at Oxford, while Bophanie read English at Bristol. A bright, sensitive and self-possessed 27-year-old, Mary is now assistant private secretary to Gareth Thomas, minister of state at the Department for International Development. When I meet her at the ministry, she admits that she's long been curious about her family background. But she's never asked her parents directly, "because," she says, "it just seems too painful and it never seems to be the right time to sit down and say, 'So what happened to you?'"

Mary has spent a lot of time reading about what took place in Cambodia and also about other atrocities around the globe. In fact, it's become her professional area of interest. As part of her work with International Development, she has spent nine months in Iraq, helping with its first democratic election, and extended periods in Sudan. Somaly had told me those nine months that Mary was in Iraq were the longest of her life, which, considering some of the months she has lived through, is a testament to the depths of maternal anxiety. "When I got back from Iraq," says Mary, "Mum said that I'd aged her 10 years."

That begs the question: how much must Somaly's own mother have aged from maternal anxiety, quite apart from her own physical hardship? "My grandmother lost six children and her husband," says Mary, "and yet, in a similar way to my mum, she was always very gentle and generous, and so good-natured that you'd never have any sense of what she'd gone through. She was very positive about her life in the UK. She learnt English through talking to her grandchildren and watching television." It's this attitude that has proved an inspiration for Mary. She could have simply enjoyed the fruits of the comfortable life that a gifted student might expect. Yet instead she has chosen to seek out the world's troubled spots and attempt to provide constructive help.

"I wanted to give something back because my sister and I have been very lucky," she says. "I think you get that a lot with second-generation refugee children: they feel they owe something." Mary is not without reservations about foreign intervention, but, perhaps informed by her knowledge of what happened in Cambodia when the world looked away, she doesn't think that inaction is the answer. "I realise that the involvement of the international community is flawed and there's an awful lot of politicking around it," she explains, with the careful phrasing of a civil servant, "but what if there was no involvement at all? When I was in Iraq, I certainly felt that on balance it was better that we were there than not there." I ask her what effect her parents' lives have had on her own choices. She thinks carefully for a while before responding. "A lot of what I do is not necessarily to seek approval or make them proud but to show them that I'm making the most of the opportunities they've given me, and that I don't take for granted that they made it and we're all here alive. My mum always says that everything else is a bonus. All she wanted was us to be safe and healthy."

The story of the Luns is a global story, and a historical one. It stretches from the jungles of Cambodia to the deserts of Sudan, and from the chaos of Baghdad to the tranquil order of Oxfordshire. It also descends generations, gradually revealing itself as the trauma subsides, providing the catharsis, if not closure, of disclosure. Thirty years on and Cambodia continues to be a country with enormous problems, though nothing to compare with the Pol Pot era. All manner of injustices remain neglected or covered up, and its continuing poverty has recently led to Oxfam returning to the country, to provide emergency relief to combat flooding. The Luns' plight cannot address those issues. Instead it articulates something deeper and more uplifting in the human spirit. The Luns are a family of survivors. To appreciate the full richness of life, and everything they so nearly lost, is the survivor's reward. But to want to contribute so much themselves, that's a very rare personal gift.

Somaly's story

I posted an article on Somaly Lun a short while ago and now another story about Somaly and her family has appeared in The Observer magazine at the weekend. It's a long article so I'll upload it in two posts. Somaly lives in the UK and I met her husband Borithy many years ago on a visit to The Cambodia Trust whilst in Phnom Penh.

We'd walk to the fields to work and see the bodies. They left them there to scare us
She was only 15 when the Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia. Now, 30 years after she fled, Somaly Lun recalls the horror of Pol Pot's regime, and how she found a new life in Oxfordshire - by Andrew Anthony (guardian.co.uk)

Somaly Lun (center) with her daughters, Bophanie (left) and Mary Thida. Photo - Antonio Olmos

A suburban-style house in the quiet Oxfordshire village of Witney is not the place you'd expect to encounter an epic drama. Yet here, in this unassuming setting, lives a supermarket cashier whose life has involved unimaginable suffering, mass murder, gut-wrenching suspense, heroic determination, war-torn love and, ultimately, a future endowed with hope. It's a story that Somaly Lun has kept secret for 30 years. Back in January 1979, Vietnam invaded its neighbour Camboodia and the communist Khmer Rouge regime collapsed, retreating back into the jungles from which it had originally emerged. Thus ended a four-year reign of homicidal terror that, even in a century featuring such butchers as Stalin, Hitler and Mao, was almost too shocking to believe. Estimates of those killed are usually placed at between 1 and 2 million from a total population of just 8 million. Before the Vietnamese intervened, it was almost impossible to escape from the country, but once the Khmer Rouge fled into the jungle, thousands of refugees poured over the border into Thailand. One of those was 20-year-old Somaly. At that time the only thing she knew about Britain was Big Ben. She couldn't imagine that a sleepy corner of Oxfordshire would become her home. But then in terms of unlikely events, moving halfway round the world was dwarfed by the miracle of her still being alive.

Somaly's childhood was shaped by the war in neighbouring Vietnam. When she was 10, her hometown of Kratie, which was close to the Vietnamese border, was illegally bombed by American B-52s. The Americans were trying to cut off Vietnamese supply lines, and on one occasion a US F-11 fighter plane flew so low in an attack that Somaly could see the pilot. Her hearing was left permanently impaired. The family fled to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, where Somaly's father was a doctor at one of the main hospitals. She was 15 when the Khmer Rouge first entered her life, in 1975, when they subjected Phnom Penh to relentless artillery bombardment. It was the last stage of a civil war between the corrupt Lon Nol government, supported by the Americans, and the Chinese-backed insurgents of the Khmer Rouge. Trapped and terrified, the battle-weary inhabitants were so relieved when the shelling finally ended that crowds came out to greet the victorious communist troops when they entered Phnom Penh, on 17 April 1975. "We were thinking it was going to be really peaceful," recalls Somaly.

The Khmer Rouge had other ideas. They responded to the welcome by announcing that everyone had to leave the city immediately. Hospitals were emptied of the sick and injured. The severely wounded were left to die on the streets. It was the first sign of the terror that was about to engulf Somaly, her family and millions of Cambodians. An estimated 20,000 people lost their lives in the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh. People were shot or beaten to death for offering the smallest sign of resistance, or even, in many cases, daring to question why they had to leave their homes. Overnight, money was banned, towns and cities abandoned, and all forms of commerce ended. Year Zero, a dark, pre-industrial age of universal enslavement, had begun. All the stunned and baffled Cambodians were told was that a mysterious authority called Angkar now oversaw every aspect of life and, as it would frequently turn out, death. Scarcely anyone within Cambodia realised that Angkar's presiding force was a failed electronics student named Saloth Sar, otherwise known as Brother Number One and, most notoriously, Pol Pot.

A small woman with finely attractive features animated by a large, easy smile, Somaly betrays nothing in her lively demeanour of the nightmare in which she was to spend the remainder of her teenage years. "My father tried to keep us calm," she says, remembering those first few days of uncertainty. "There were nine children. I had an elder brother, elder sister and then six younger brothers." Of the 11 family members, only four survived the killing fields. Democratic Kampuchea, as it was called, promised liberation, but in reality it was an enormous prison in which hunger, torture, forced labour and the ever-present threat of death formed the parameters of existence. At first, the family walked to Somaly's grandparent's village, where, under the command of the Khmer Rouge, they were put to work in the fields. "They treated us quite bad because they said we were soft," she says. "You know, we had soft hands and soft feet. So they made us work hard and they criticised us every day after work." Family members were forced to accuse and inform on one another. At night, spies would listen to any whispers of dissent. "We had to learn very quickly," says Somaly, "because there were people being taken away because of what they'd been saying." "Taken away", as Somaly soon learned, was a euphemism for murdered. Those killed, usually beaten with spades and clubs, were left in open graves for everyone to see. "You walked to the field to do your work and you'd see the mass collection of bodies. They were doing it to scare us."

As food became increasingly scarce, the family was moved to Pursat, deep in the countryside, in what amounted to a concentration camp. Her father was soon taken away, first to treat a senior party official and then, inevitably, to be murdered. Although all the senior members of the Khmer Rouge were educated abroad in France, anyone else with an education, including much-needed doctors, was seen as a dangerous class enemy that had to be eliminated. Later, Somaly's eldest brother was caught hoarding food rations. "He was accused of being a spy for the CIA and the KGB," she says, now speaking very quietly. "He would not admit it, but whether you admit it or not didn't make any difference. He was beaten to death." Malaria and typhoid were a constant threat and food rations hovered around starvation level – thousands died from malnutrition, and many more were killed for attempting to find food. "My little brother was 10," says Somaly. "When you're 10, you're hungry. He saw a sweet potato and he dug it up and took it. And the punishment was death. He was led away and put into…" she stops, struggling to articulate the appalling image in her mind "…it was like a hut. They got about 50 or 100 people in there. He was led into it and they burned them alive. I heard the screams. Because it's too exhausting for them to kill them by beating them to death, so burning them was easier. They just hated us, even though we are the same people. That's what I couldn't understand. Every day I'd think, why doesn't anyone get up and fight?"

Crying was forbidden and brought extreme punishment, so Somaly would wait until night to allow herself silent tears. In the midst of this revolutionary dystopia, one of the most difficult ideas for the teenager to accept was the thought that the world had abandoned Cambodia. "I kept thinking all the time, 'Why does no one come and rescue us?' We'd look up in the sky for the sign of a plane. Any little sound of gunfire got us excited – Somebody must have come! But it was just them killing somebody who had escaped, otherwise they wouldn't waste their bullets." For most of her time living under the Khmer Rouge, she was separated from her family and transferred around the country on a work brigade. During the rainy season, she would plant rice, working up to 18 hours a day, and in the dry season she would take part in dam construction and maintenance. Four more of her brothers were to die from a mixture of exhaustion, starvation and sickness.

By August 1979, the Vietnamese were in control of most of Cambodia, but Somaly and her family were in a part of the country still ruled by the Khmer Rouge. Just weeks from liberation, one of her two surviving brothers came to her complaining of illness. "He was malnourished, his belly swollen. Then suddenly he got this bubble of water beneath his skin and he cried and said: 'Look what happened to me.' And I knew that he wouldn't last. A week later he died. You just see your brother die in front of you. Just like that." Facing outright defeat, the Khmer Rouge had begun a desperate campaign to kill as many Cambodians as possible rather than allow them to be taken by the Vietnamese. In Pursat, hundreds were forced off cliffs to their deaths. And where Somaly was stationed, a mass killing meant the only hope of staying alive was to escape. Along with 100 or so other captives, Somaly fled at night into the jungle. They were chased by the Khmer Rouge – "people lost their babies, people were shot" – as they were pursued through mangrove swamps. "I had no legs," she remembers. "When you haven't had much food to eat and you try to run and they're shooting at us… I said, 'Just go, leave me.'"

One of the things that Somaly learned during that period in Cambodia was that often in the darkest and most despairing moments, someone would offer a word of comfort or a hand of help. And so it was that one of the other escapees reached out and dragged her through the swamp, yanking her up from the fatalism of exhaustion. They still had to hide for four days in a boat on Tonle Sap lake without any food. One night they came within feet of a Khmer Rouge patrol, but managed to silently slip away. Finally, their nerves shattered, they reached the Vietnamese zone. By this time, Somaly had learned of the killings at Pursat and feared that the remainder of her family had perished. Even so, she decided to maintain a vigil by a road on which an endless tide of Cambodians was heading towards Phnom Penh. After almost four weeks of asking passersby if they'd heard anything of her family, she spotted her mother. Once again her legs failed her when she tried to run. So instead, she started shouting "Mum! Mum! Mum!" Her mother was with the two other surviving siblings, a younger brother and older sister. "We all just cried," Somaly recalls, beaming at the memory. "It was the happiest day of my life."

To be continued in Part 2.

Somaly Lun's story

The Mirror newspaper in the UK has come up trumps again with a story in their online edition yesterday. In recalling Cambodia thirty years ago, they focused on Somaly Lun, who I haven't met personally, but I knew her husband Borithy, when he was working at the Cambodia Trust in the late 1990s. They also highlighted Marcus Thompson, who did so much for Oxfam around that time and I've always been fascinated by some of his pictures of Phnom Penh in the early 1980s. Anyway, here's the story.

Somaly Lun and Marcus Thompson today (pic Harry Page, Getty)

Cambodia's killing fields 30 years on: 'They will kill our parents tonight...we must escape' - by Ros Wynne-Jones (Mirror.co.uk)

It is 30 years since John Pilger revealed the existence of the Cambodian Killing Fields in the Daily Mirror. For Somaly Lun, the anniversary is bittersweet. Today, customers at the Oxfordshire supermarket checkout where she works have no idea of her extraordinary story. How she escaped US B-52 bombers as a child, a Khmer Rouge concentration camp as a teenager, and Vietnamese soldiers as a young woman. How she lost her father and six brothers to the Khmer Rouge. Somaly owes her life in the UK to Oxfam's Marcus Thompson, then a young humanitarian worker who had become friends with Somaly and her husband Borithy. "England gave me the first safe place I had ever lived," Somaly says.

By the time she was 10, her home town of Kratie was under attack, even though Cambodia was neutral. Kratie was close to the border with Vietnam which was at war with the States, and US President Richard Nixon ordered 100,000 tonnes of secret bombings. "The B-52s came every day," Somaly recalls. "Every day, shooting and bombing and running." One day a man grabbed her as an F-11 US fighter jet swept low and held her in front of him as a shield. "The plane was so low I could almost see the pilot's face," she says. It permanently damaged her hearing. Somaly's family fled to Phnom Penh, but by 1975 it had fallen to Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Backed by the US against the Vietnamese communists, the Khmer Rouge were determined to return Cambodia to Year Zero, to a time before industrialisation. "My father, a doctor, was in the middle of an operation the day the Khmer Rouge came," Somaly says. "He said, 'What about the patient?' They pointed a gun at him and asked, 'Do you want to die?'"

Somaly's family were herded out at gunpoint with two million other people. The family was taken to Pursat, a concentration camp in the remote countryside. Then the Khmer Rouge came for Somaly's father. "They said, 'We know you are a doctor'." The first time, they wanted him to treat one of the leaders. But the second time, "they took him away and he never came back". Somaly was forced to spend 20 hours a day as a slave doing hard labour in the rice fields despite starvation, exhaustion and malaria. Her older brother was caught saving his food rations for her. "They made him confess he was a US spy," she says. "They kept beating him until he died. Then my younger brother was taken. They put him in a prison with other children, and burned it to the ground. The screams have haunted me ever since. "One day, they came and took 2,000 people. One of the girls came back like a zombie with blood all over her. She said, 'They killed everyone'." Then, one day a pal whispered: "They are killing our parents and we have to escape now, tonight." Somaly says: "After dark we went to where people were gathered with three big boats." The Khmer Rouge chased them along the river, firing at the boats. She says: "We hid in the mangrove and caught fish and ate it raw as we didn't dare to make a fire. We drank muddy water. We all became sick - just skin and bones." Everyone on Somaly's boat was drifting in and out of consciousness. "But somehow it arrived by itself at Kampong Chhnang, where the Khmer Rouge was driven out," she says. "They gave us food, water, shelter."

New escapees from Pursat told Somaly that thousands had been taken to a cliff and forced off at gunpoint. Yet, somehow her mother, sister and brother had escaped. "The day I saw them again was the happiest day of my life," Somaly says. When they returned to Phnom Penh in 1979 they found a ghost city occupied by the Vietnamese liberators. Somaly took a job at the hotel Samaki - now Le Royale - as a receptionist, where she met Borithy, who was working for the Cambodian foreign office as a translator. She also met Marcus Thompson, a 34-year-old British aid worker sent by Oxfam to set up a humanitarian programme. "We became friends," he remembers. "We were all stuck together at the hotel." But Cambodia was still dangerous - and Borithy was warned to leave Phnom Penh. "He said he was in love with me and refused to leave without me," Somaly says. On March 16, 1980, the couple married in secret inside a destroyed pagoda. The next day, they escaped. Passing through fields of landmines, they made it through Vietnamese, then Khmer Rouge territory and even past the Thai border guards to Khao I Dang, a squalid refugee camp on the border. Somaly wrote to her family and to Marcus to tell them they were alive. "I needed to go to those camps as part of my work," Marcus says. Somaly says she will never forget seeing Marcus walking through the camp. "I cried out 'Marcus!' and just hung on to his neck," she says.

Marcus was shocked by their plight. "They couldn't go back to Cambodia," he says. "The Thais wouldn't accept them. We had to do something." Back in England, Marcus and his Oxfam colleagues went through official channels to ask whether Britain would accept the family as refugees. "We had no expectation anything would happen," Marcus says. "But then we got a letter saying 'Yes'." Somaly, 22 and pregnant, arrived in the UK on May 12, 1981, with Borithy, Somaly's mother Moeun, brother Rithy and sister Virak - and settled close to Marcus and his family in Witney, Oxfordshire. "People at the Oxfam offices donated all kinds of furniture, saucepans, an old TV, carpets," Somaly remembers.

Today, the couple's daughters are success stories in their own right. The youngest, 23-year-old Bophanie, is a teacher in Brighton, while her sister, Mary Thida Lun, 27, is Assistant Private Secretary to the Minister of State for International Development, Gareth Thomas. At 64, Marcus still works as an adviser to Oxfam, and the charity remains working in Cambodia, still tackling the legacy of the dark days of the Khmer Rouge and facing new challenges from climate change, typhoons and flooding. Today, 30 years on, when she goes to and from work at the local supermarket, living her British life, Somaly sometimes remembers the words her father said to her before they took him away. "He said, 'You are going to survive. You are going to go places'." She shakes her head slowly. "I think that was what gave me the strength to survive."